Why the next world order will be won on economy, not military

A doctor’s son who took an accidental turn

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Hamza in the most compressed way possible: visiting Islamabad from London, vice president of macro rates sales at Goldman Sachs, founder of Bondh e Shams, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia at twenty-eight. The CV is precise. The path that produced it was not.

Hamza’s father was a doctor in the Pakistan Army, which meant moving every three years and, for the first six years of school, no school at all. Class one to six were home-schooled, with three years of that time spent in Saudi Arabia. School proper began in class six in Karachi, then Beaconhouse and Roots in Rawalpindi for O- and A-levels. He sat the SATs the way everyone around him did — “yaar chalo matlab saare kar rahe hain to apply to kar dete hain” — and got into Williams College in Massachusetts. He had not heard of it before he applied.

The choice mattered. Williams was a small liberal arts college, top of its category for undergraduate teaching, with a seven-to-one student-teacher ratio. The model — three required course divisions across arts and languages, social sciences and hard sciences before you could declare a major — was the part Hamza wanted. He majored in economics, political science and leadership studies, spent a year at Exeter College, Oxford reading PPE, met Hamid Karzai and John Cena at separate events, and graduated in 2015.

Muzamil names him repeatedly through this opening — partly to anchor the listener, partly because the story is the point. The Williams network would later be the reason a Pakistani fresh off the boat got a foot inside Goldman Sachs at all.

Bondh e Shams started because he could not find an internship

The summer before his final year, Hamza did what he calls the most consequential thing in his life after his family — and he is clear it began as a placeholder. “Full disclosure,” he tells Muzamil, “I did this project mostly because I couldn’t find any other internships. Kuch to karna na yaar.”

He applied for a ten-thousand-dollar grant from a peace-and-conflict programme, had to argue to the committee that water was the foundation under everything else, won the grant, and went back to his village in Chakwal. There he installed a solar-powered water well — “I am not gonna profess to knowing exactly what I was doing” — and watched what happened next. Children who used to fetch water started going to school. The anecdotes accumulated. The project that was a CV line became Bondh e Shams.

By the end of the conversation, Hamza reports that the organisation has provided forty million cups of clean water across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and South Sudan. Muzamil is direct about what the trajectory means: Hamza ranks family, then Bondh e Shams, then Goldman Sachs. The order is not what most people would have guessed.

Breaking into Goldman without a US visa

Muzamil asks the question many young Pakistanis ask him about Wall Street: how does an outsider get in? Hamza pushes back gently on the framing. “It’s not a white person’s club. It’s the elite educated club.” Williams and Oxford had already put him inside the perimeter. The harder problem was the visa.

He applied to thirty colleges, got into Williams, applied to dozens of jobs, got into Goldman — analyst on the corporate treasury desk in New York. The interviews kept circling back to Bondh e Shams. The standard pleasantries — tell us about an internship — would give him an opening to tell the water-project story, and the interviewers would lean in. Goldman, Hamza explains, runs something called the airport test: if you were stuck in an airport with this candidate, could you stand them? Story-shaped answers won that test.

The first year ended with the H-1B lottery. Three internationals on his team, none of them drawn. The Hong Kong analyst was sent to Hong Kong. The Bangladeshi analyst was sent to London. Hamza was offered Warsaw. “Yaar Poland kidhar chala jaaun main?” He negotiated, applied to Goldman London separately as a fresh applicant, lost the offer on Brexit day, applied a third time, and eventually landed in London on the macro side — moving from corporate treasury to markets, from liquidity management to dissecting policy decisions and their effects on rates. That is the seat he speaks from for the rest of the conversation.

The pivots that built the world we live in

The middle of the conversation is the heart of it. Muzamil asks the loaded question — where is the global economy headed — and Hamza answers by refusing to take it as one question. He maps it as a sequence of pivots.

The starting point, in his reading, is not COVID and not 2008. It is 9/11. “I think until 9/11 you had a certain rhythm to the way things were happening,” he says. After 9/11 the United States looked at the world through a security lens. The Pentagon became central to policymaking. Globalisation kept expanding underneath that — Amazon, Google, transport hubs, the IT boom — but the political frame had shifted.

The second pivot is 2008. The financial crisis exposed how deeply integrated the world had become. “You cannot be a bank in the US, fail and have no impact on China or Pakistan or India,” Hamza says. The institutions had become too big to fail. The butterfly effect was now an economic reality, even if the social and political integration had not caught up.

The third pivot is 2016 — Brexit, Trump, the rise of inward-looking politics across the developed world. Hamza names Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping-point framing here: the discontent had been building, and a single year crystallised it. The grievance, as he reads it, was a developed-world public asking why their Indian neighbour was driving a Mercedes while their call-centre jobs went offshore. Trump, in this telling, was the representation of that frustration, not its cause.

The fourth pivot is COVID. This is where Hamza shifts into the technical register he is paid for, and where Muzamil keeps pulling him back into plain language.

Monetary policy, fiscal policy, and why Pakistan pays seven percent

Muzamil asks the question he says an average Pakistani actually asks: how does the US seem to print dollars without consequence while Pakistan worries about every billion of debt? Hamza’s answer is to refuse the comparison.

He walks through the basics first. Monetary policy is the central bank setting the prevailing interest rate — Reza Baqir in Pakistan, Jerome Powell in the US. Higher rates encourage saving, lower rates encourage spending. Fiscal policy is government spending, often financed by issuing bonds. The two interact constantly, and “thousands of papers have been written” on the back-and-forth.

Then he reframes. Imagine four countries lined up as siblings asking the world for money — the United States, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. Different family backgrounds, different jobs, different stability. The world is happy to lend to the United States at close to zero percent because the world trusts it can pay back. By the time the line reaches Pakistan, the rate is seven and a half percent. “Pakistan, thoda sa main kuch nahin kehta. Matlab har cheez chalti hai.”

The US debt ceiling looks infinite, he says, because the US “is the system.” That is not earth-shaking — it is just what credit risk looks like when you sit on top of it. Pakistan, by contrast, cannot pay back sixteen billion easily. The US can manage trillions without breaking. The point Hamza wants Muzamil’s audience to take away is unglamorous: a country’s borrowing position is the cleanest read of where it actually sits in the world.

Why the next war is economic

Muzamil pushes the conversation forward — what about China? What about the next twenty years? Hamza was working on this question as an undergraduate in 2012. The literature at the time predicted China overtaking the US by 2025. He believed it then. He still does, with the per-capita caveat.

But the more important point, in his reading, is that the military lever has been retired. “You can’t, matlab, sure you can position your ships there. Will you actually nuke or will you actually send missiles to China? You are not going to do that. You’ve got way too much to lose.” He uses the cold-war phrase — mutually assured destruction — and applies it to economic interdependence. China owns enormous amounts of US debt. The leverage runs both ways. The result, Hamza argues, is a world where “the strength of your economy and how much you produce for the world in terms of exports and how strong you are financially is infinitely more important than how many ships you have and how many guns you have and how many bazookas you have.”

Muzamil tests the thesis with examples. Venezuela, not successful. Syria, not successful. Afghanistan, “colossal failure.” He cites the G7 Build Back Better World initiative as a sign that the US is itself shifting toward economic competition. Hamza agrees with the direction. Where the US has been on the back foot, China has invested — sixty billion into CPEC in Pakistan, similar engagements in Sri Lanka and across Africa. The terms, he notes, are not philanthropic. “China is not a grant making body. Unhone apni economy ke liye invest karna hai. Unko returns chahiye.” But the willingness to write the cheque is the point. The other side stopped writing the cheque.

The two-variable model for Pakistan

This is where the conversation turns inward. Muzamil asks what Pakistan can expect in the new global economic order. Hamza reaches for the Harrod-Domar growth model and strips it down to two variables.

The first is technology, innovation and education — the X-factor that can change a country’s trajectory. The second is solving internal inefficiencies. That, he says, is the China lesson that nobody talks about. The growth from 1980 onwards came from solving internal problems first.

Pakistan, he argues, has the inputs the model needs. Demographics — the sixty-percent-under-thirty statistic that Hamza admits he is “sort of getting sick of” but which is still real. Access to the sea. Geographical diversity. Agriculture. A nuclear deterrent that takes existential threat off the table.

What it does not have is the internal house in order. Hamza is concrete. Two weeks ago, he says, he tried to do a land transaction. A man arrived with a register, made a few entries, and asked to take the register home. “I know we are trying to digitize our land assets and all those things. But this is exactly it.” Corruption, friction in registering a business, the fact that Pakistanis themselves are afraid to do business in Pakistan — these are the inefficiencies that have to be solved before foreign investment becomes a meaningful question. “Pehle apne jo businessman hain unse to business karwa le pehle. Kyunki hum khud yahan business karne se darte hain.”

The basics, in his framing, are not abstract. “Roti, kapra, makaan” works as a slogan, but operationally it means water, healthcare, ease of doing business, the security to walk down a street without losing your phone. Get those right and the economy grows on its own. Get them wrong and no amount of dollar inflow will hold.

An overheated economy and a current account back to 2018

Muzamil, watching the one-hour mark pass, narrows the lens to the present moment. Pakistan corrected course painfully after 2018 — current account deficit, currency adjustment, inflation absorbed. COVID arrived on top of that. By early 2021 the numbers were finally good. Then, he argues, a populist budget was tabled that overheated the economy within four months. Tax revenue spiked. So did imports. The current account deficit returned to 2018 levels. Now policy is reversing on itself.

Hamza does not defend the budget. He answers from the citizen’s side first. “It is impossible to look at policy and say ki haan theek hai. Jab aapko pata hai jab aap daal ya cheeni lene ke liye jaaoge to aapki salary se aapko higher proportion dena padega.” With the interest rate at 7.5 percent and inflation at 8, the real rate of return on money in the bank is negative one percent. That is a citizen reality, not an analyst reality.

The deeper problem, in his reading, is the export base. Pakistan’s exports are textiles, jute, cotton — goods exposed to demand cycles that the country does not control. India exports IT services worth, he estimates, seventy or eighty billion in a year. Pakistan’s entire export sector is around thirty billion. The 2021 surplus came partly from remittances and partly from a global demand spike that has now reversed. “We opened the market early on before India and Bangladesh as well COVID ki wajah se to humein thoda sa wahan pe bhi thoda fayda ho gaya tha.” The boom was real. It was also borrowed.

The dollar is not a scorecard

The last technical exchange is the cleanest. Muzamil asks whether the rupee-dollar rate is a representation of a country’s strength. Hamza is unequivocal: “It’s not. Not not by a long shot.”

The reason, he says, is visible in the current data. The dollar is strengthening against the pound. The dollar is strengthening against the euro. It is a cross-currency phenomenon driven by demand for the dollar itself, not a verdict on the rupee. Political point-scoring will always weaponise the headline number. The fix, he argues, is bold representation in public dialogue — actually explaining what policymakers are doing, rather than relying on a closed-room consensus. “We don’t live in a world jahan pe aap apne kamre mein baith kar decision making kar lo and parliament baith kar decision making kar lo aur aam aadmi jo marzi sochta rahe.”

2050, optimistic and otherwise

Muzamil closes with his standing question: where is Pakistan in thirty years? Hamza gives two scenarios.

The optimistic one is the one he has been arguing toward for an hour. Fix the inefficiencies. Get the basics right. Cash the demographics. Attract real investment. In that world, Pakistan can be a regional powerhouse — not because India will slow down, but because per-capita growth favours the smaller, younger population if the policy is right. He adds a quieter line about what that country would look like internally: equality of genders to the extent achievable, religion lived at the personal rather than the state-mandated level, the basics universal.

The warning scenario is the more important one. Pakistan growing at two or three percent is still growth in absolute terms. But strength is relative. “Agar aap aaj se tees saal ke andar 2%, 3% bhi grow karte rahe you will still have grown, will still be a better country. But agar aapke neighbours jo hain pandrah percent percent pe grow kar jaate hain. Aap to relatively you would be in stone age essentially.” Other countries are taking the pivots. The decision is whether Pakistan takes them too.

Muzamil signs off at the one-hour-twenty-three-minute mark — one of the longest conversations the show has done — by hoping Hamza serves the nation with the same vigour wherever he ends up. Hamza’s closing thought is about the people he works with: a generation that has watched the same cycle replay too many times and has finally understood that the next twenty years are theirs to lose. “These guys won’t be around in twenty years. We will be.”